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Marcus Stroman was struggling to get into his Alice in Wonderland frock. Aaron Sanchez flashed pole-dancer sass in hot pants and fishnet stockings. Todd Redmond shimmied into micro-shorts, curly wig and sweat headband, clapping his hands a la Richard Simmons exercise video in the middle of the clubhouse.

You could hardly tell the Blue Jays had just dropped a heartbreaking extra-innings game to Tampa Bay 6-5, though the levity did feel a mite strained.

Thus the Toronto rookies departed Rogers Centre dolled up in their outrageous ensembles — an annual hazing ritual imposed on scrubeenies — for their final road trip of the season, compelled to remain in costume for the charter flight, through the Baltimore airport and on to the team’s hotel.

Wait. Redmond — who surrendered a flat fastball, eighth-inning home run to detested ex-Jay Yunel Escobar that put Toronto in a 5-1 hole — isn’t a rookie. An ink-stained wretch, observing the locker-room shenanigans, noted dryly: “Maybe he just likes dressing that way.”

That dinger didn’t seem to matter much, with Toronto already badly trailing and flailing. But then Adam Lind drilled a juicy offering over the left-field wall — going yard for the second day in a row, cashing in the two Joses, Reyes and Bautista. And, in the bottom of the ninth, two out, John Mayberry Jr. came off the bench as a pinch hitter, lifting the crowd out of its seats with a magnificent 1-2 swing that also sailed out of the park. It’s what he does — Mayberry the Younger’s fourth pinch-hitting home run of the year, seventh in his career.

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Alas, the heroics were for naught.

It should have ended better for the Jays, scratching and clawing and long balling to stay in the wild-card chase.

Instead, Brandon Morrow gave up a lead-off walk and single in the tenth. A clearly gassed Brett Cecil, summoned from the pen for the second day in a row because the franchise is mollycoddling Sanchez (he threw two innings of relief on Friday, which in the Jays’ world requires two days rest), walked Escobar and Sean Rodriguez plated the nudge-ahead run on a sac fly.

Toronto ran out of mojo in their bottom half, exiting quietly 1-2-3, thus losing the game and the series to a club 17 games back of the American League East-leading Orioles.

Gut-wrenching stuff, a ripe opportunity squandered.

“This time of year, where we’re at, there’s really no room for error, so yeah, that makes it tougher,” said manager John Gibbons afterwards. “When you battle back . . . It was one of those games where you’re out of it the whole way, kind of moving along, and then we came back and struck real quick and now the momentum’s on your side.

“You come back and you end up dropping it. Those are always tough.”

Gibbons defended opting for Cecil, who couldn’t keep the situation he inherited from Morrow from doing game-winning damage. “You look at some of the jams he’s gotten out of in the last couple of weeks and he almost got us out of that one.”

Cut to the chase, though, and the Jays are still four games out of wild card territory and looking for scraps of generosity from other contending teams.

They allowed 14 hits on Sunday to a no-hope outfit while almost completely confounded by Tampa starter Chris Archer, nicked for only three hits through seven before Toronto got into the Rays’ shaky bullpen.

“Obviously we don’t like the position we’re in,” said Mark Buehrle, who lasted six frames and departed with the visitors up 4-0, which meant only that Toronto’s starters have now endured at least six innings through 20 straight games, a first for the Jays but small solace in the bigger picture.

“If there was only one team in front of us that was in a playoff position, then it would be a different story. But I think we all know we’re not in a good position. We need help from other teams but at the same time we’ve got to worry about ourselves and try to win the games we’re playing. I can sit here and say we’re in a better position but we’re not. And we kind of put ourselves there and we’ve got to deal with that.”

They almost dealt with it Sunday, in typical ball-ripping fashion — second behind Baltimore in homers — with Edwin Encarnacion’s 32nd of the season in the seventh, Lind’s three-run shot and then Mayberry connecting for dugout joy in one of his infrequent at-bats since acquired from Philadelphia just before the waiver deadline.

He’d been given a heads-up about pinch-hit duty. “They kind of talked through it the inning before, possible match-up scenarios. As a guy coming off the bench, you just try to stay ready . . . take some balls off the tee, do some running, just anything to keep my body warm.”

With two out, Mayberry was down to his last strike against left-handed reliever Jake McGee.

“I’m just in battle mode in that at-bat,” said the 30-year-old. “Trying to put the ball in black and snuck one over the fence. He threw me a fastball down and in. I just tried to stay inside it, stay through it and hit it hard.

“It was obviously a great thrill.”

Until the thrill was gone on a sac fly.

The Jays, who started Colby Rasmus in centre for the first time since Aug. 31 — he struck out three times — were undone by some rotten luck in the fourth when Bautista lost a ball in the sun, just before the sun disappeared behind cloud cover. Bautista put up his glove in a futile attempt to seize some shade but he clearly didn’t know where the ball was as it deflected into the corner. A gimme out would ultimately segue into two runs.

Bautista’s misadventures continued in the eighth when he chased a fly ball into foul territory and locked gloves with a fan. Originally ruled a foul, the call was overturned on appeal and declared fan interference.

“I was going to catch it the whole way, had a good bead on it. I was trying to time myself so I don’t run into the fans too hard. And I did it perfect. I went to just close my glove and his glove was right in front of my glove.”

The teenager was obviously stricken.

“It’s OK,’’ said Batista. “They’re kids. Most of the time when that happens, it’s kids. What can you do?”

What Bautista wouldn’t do, as the team hustled for the bus, was wallow in regret over the loss.

“We’ve been playing great baseball. The last four games that we’ve lost have all been by one run. We’re battling.”

Didn’t hurt more, the way it happened.

“Totally the opposite. We gave it our best. We never gave up. We came back and tied it. We just couldn’t pull through at the end.”

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